Turbine engines, and particularly gas or combustion turbine engines, are rotary engines that extract energy from a flow of combusted gases passing through the engine onto a multitude of turbine blades. Gas turbine engines have been used for land and nautical locomotion and power generation, but are most commonly used for aeronautical applications such as for airplanes, including helicopters. In airplanes, gas turbine engines are used for propulsion of the aircraft.
Gas turbine engines for aircraft are designed to operate at high temperatures to maximize engine thrust, so cooling of certain engine components, such as the high pressure turbine and the low pressure turbine, may be necessary. Typically, cooling is accomplished by ducting cooler air from the high and/or low pressure compressors to the engine components which require cooling. When cooling the turbines, cooling air may be passed through an interior of the turbine vanes.
One approach to cooling is to route the compressor air though the interior of the turbine vanes, where the cooling air can then pass into the rotor to cool portions of the rotors, such as the rotating disks on which the blades are mounted. To avoid efficiency losses, it is desirable for the cooling air exiting the vane and entering the rotor to be oriented to generally align with the rotational direction of the rotor and to match the speed of the rotating disk.